It wasn't bad, truly it wasn't, but it needed to be lighted up a little! We tried a few different products to bring the wood back to life and make the tone not so red but it just wasn't working for us. Another thing I knew had to change was the red tiled hearth, and I knew exactly what I was going to do with it from the first time I saw it!

In case you missed it, December was a CRAZY month for us - we listed our little split foyer and it sold way faster than we expected it to! We already had an offer in on another house that had just been flipped so we accepted the first offer on our house thinking we had our bases covered but the inspection on the one we thought were buying was an absolute NIGHTMARE! [cue panic] Now that it is all over with, I am so glad the other house didn't work out because about 2 weeks later, we found the most perfect house!!! You better believe its a fixer upper; I wouldn't have it any other way! The kitchen being "the heart of the home" is 100% true for us, so its the first place we started.

This week, my sweet husband and I are celebrating another year of marriage so I feel like it's time for a heartfelt and totally transparent post. With it, I've included two TOTALLY embarrassing and equally humbling pictures of what our bedroom looked like for the first 3-6 months we were married. Are you ready?

As I've mentioned before, this year our focus is the exterior of our house. We had big plans that included painting our exterior brick white but after much research and consulting with paint professionals, we decided it wasn't the right choice for us. Painting the sidewalk was on the long list of to-dos but a lot of those things dropped off the list when the white brick did, but I decided to move forward with this plan.

This season, I am craving simplicity; so much so that I am doing the 40 bags in 40 days challenge. I started a day late so I am officially on day 8 and so far I am at 13 bags - I never thought I'd be so happy to see so much stuff leaving my house. Anywho, you aren't here to read about that so I'll get on with it.

We gutted our bathroom when we bought our house and updated it some but my style has clearly changed some since then. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with it the way it was, it just simply felt out of place considering the rest of our home is now full of neutrals, woods, and whites.

​If you've read some of my other posts, you know that I painted my bathroom linoleum a few months back. I did the same thing here BUT I used different products because this is a bathroom, mudroom, and laundry room and it gets much more traffic. After doing a ton of research on an alternative to the chalk paint that some of you were hesitant to use, I decided to try Porch & Floor paint. It went on easily, the only downside to this alternative was longer dry times between coats.

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​We haven't done much in our laundry room since moving in and we finally decided to tackle it. Sure, it could have been worse but between the floor (which had stains all over it from who knows what) and the blue paint on the walls, it felt very out of place in the rest of our neutral, woods and whites, home.

After creating an inspiration board, I realized that I REALLY wanted subway tile in our laundry room. BUT..... that just wasn't in the budget, so I partnered with Cutting Edge Stencils and came up with a way to fake it.